Student Struggles at a Struggling Institution

Student Activism at a Struggling Institution: The Case of University of Limpopo, South Africa By Bjarke Oxlund, Dept. of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen The Vice-Chancellor’s Inauguration The 15 th of September 2006 saw the inaugural ceremony for Professor Mokgalong to become the first permanent Vice-Chancellor of University of Limpopo, which had been created in 2005. As part of a national reform designed to restructure the landscape of higher education in South Africa, University of Limpopo had come into being through a merger between University of the North (UNIN) and the Medical University of South Africa (MEDUNSA). Lying several hundred kilometres apart and situated in two separate provinces run by separate local governments, the two institutions were not the most likely bed mates. Still, the merger had been carried through by the ANC led government, and Professor Mokgalong had now been named as the Vice-Chancellor of the new university. Small pamphlets were therefore distributed all over campus inviting students and staff members to attend the inaugural ceremony at the main theatre at 09h30. The newly developed “Vision” and “Mission” statements of the University’s “Strategic Plan” had been neatly pasted on one side of the pamphlet, so as to underscore that this was in important step in becoming a “world class” university “epitomizing excellence and global competitiveness”. This happened to also be the first day of my ethnographic fieldwork at Turfloop, which is how the campus that used to make up UNIN is popularly known. The inauguration seemed an opportune occasion for the participant observation to get started, and I sneaked into Great Tiro Hall (the university’s main theatre named after local struggle hero Abram Tiro). Tiro Hall accommodates approximately a thousand people in rows of chairs that rise steeply towards the back of the theatre. From these elevated seats, members of the audience look down towards the stage which is equipped almost as a real theatre. At its highest, the ceiling rises some twelve to fifteen meters above the ground and creates an impressive indoor space that is partly illuminated during daytime, since rays of sunlight make it through the yellow glass used for the windows positioned immediately below the ceiling. Tiro Hall was nearly full and hundreds of students and staff members were still queuing at the main entrances and the side exits. While the Program Director, Mr Mohuba, was making his introductory remarks, a tiny black bird made it through a broken window, and it was almost as if her loud singing and the disturbance it caused gave a small hint of what was about to happen. 1 The word was passed over to the Chairman of the Council, Professor Tebogo Mokgoro, who talked to the merits of Professor Mokgalong in his former capacity as interim Vice-Chancellor. He also provided an outline of the challenges and difficulties that were integral to the merger process and the university reforms at large. Meanwhile, the sound of a large group of people singing emerged from outside the Hall, where members of student organizations had begun to toy -toy , which is a South African protest style of dancing and singing used during the struggle against apartheid. Emanating from behind the main entrances at the back of the Hall, hundreds of singing students now entered the Hall, where chaos and noise erupted. The interference forced the Chairman to make lengthy pauses to his speech, simply because it was not audible among the audiences. Nevertheless, he stuck to his path and at the first signs of order, the Chairman summoned up in a tough voice that: “Nobody can hold anything against the process that has led to the appointment of the new Vice-Chancellor”. Thereafter he sat down. Mr Mohuba then passed the word to the Vice-Chancellor, who delivered a stock-taking of the accomplishments made so far in the merger process, as well as the developments anticipated for the coming year. Tiro Hall was now relatively quiet, and so the Vice-Chancellor was not interrupted in his presentation itself, whereas the subsequent ‘Question & Answer’-session again made a noisy and polemical event of the ceremony. At first, a couple of students made requests for the microphone to present the Vice-Chancellor with critical questions about supplementary exams and increasing tuition fees. Subsequently, student leaders rose amidst jubilant cheering to launch insults and accusations against the Chairman of the Council, who they claimed to be a “liar” and “a hypocrite”. They made references to an article published in a national newspaper two months prior to the event, where the Chairman was apparently quoted to deem the interim Vice-Chancellor “unappointable”. This led some to accuse him of having had an interest in the position as Vice-Chancellor himself, while others continued to ask: “How can the Chairman ask us to rally behind a VC the he has himself deemed unappointable?”. When the Chairman recaptured the point that nothing could be held against the appointment process, 25 – 30 students shouted “Order” repeatedly to indicate that the Chairman was out of order in his rejection of the question. Mr Mohuba seemed paralyzed in his role as Program Director, but when a nobly dressed male lecturer and a female student made requests for the microphone, he seemed relieved and quickly pointed them out. Probably against his expectations, the student screamed into the microphone that: “The hypocrite Chairman must step down!”, while the lecturer in a more polite tone questioned: “...the connection between the appointment and the Chairman’s statements made to national media.” This blew the roof off Tiro Hall. Up to 50 student leaders now stood up and shouted insults at the Chairman, while campus security guards entered the Hall from the side entrances. The situation was clearly getting out of 2 hand, and one particular student leader was now chased by several guards into the roves of seats where other students were sitting. At this point the Master of ceremony made what appeared to be a wise decision, when he declared from the podium that the inaugural ceremony had now reached its end. The security guards immediately backed off, while hundreds of students started toy-toying and the rest of us slowly left Tiro Hall. Over the next fourteen months the tensions that marred the inauguration ceremony would develop to the stage of campus-wide turmoil, where buildings and vehicles were set alight and student groupings clashed with police forces on campus. There is thus a remarkable similarity between these contemporary events and events of the struggle against apartheid, for which Turfloop campus has been famous since its inception. Student Activism The Turfloop campus of the current University of Limpopo was opened in 1959 as the University College of the North under the trusteeship of the University of South Africa with the specific aim of serving the black population only (Maja, Gwabeni and Mokwele 2005:24). The ideology of separation was a determining factor for locating the institution in a rural township 30 kilometres east of the provincial capital (Polokwane; formerly known as Pietersburg). The naming of the township as Sovenga was drawn from the three main ethnic groups of the area (Sotho, Venda and Tsonga) so as to emphasise the ethnic basis of the university college (White 1997:75). From 1970 it started operating independently as the University of the North, which remained the name of the university up until it was merged with the Medical University of South Africa in 2005. As the second-largest black university in South Africa, the University of the North had a proud history of student activism. It was here that the legendary black consciousness leader Steve Biko, among others, launched the South African Student Organisation (SASO) in 1969 aimed to promote a strong sense of identity amongst black students (Dawson 2006:278). Turfloop came to have a history of tension, riots, demonstrations and unrest and thus features prominently in a “Barometer of student struggles” recently developed by a journal for activists (Khanya 2004). An article called “Turfloop tension” published by the Sunday Express on 20 October 1974 summoned up how Turfloop was viewed by the white minority rulers: “Turfloop has been the scene of Black student militancy almost since the day it opened in 1960. It has been the stronghold of SASO, the Black students' movement and has provided it 3 with three presidents. Strife reached a peak two years ago when a student leader, Abram Tiro, was summarily expelled for criticising the Bantu Education system in a speech at a graduation ceremony. This sparked off Black and White student demonstrations - and a corresponding police crackdown - around the country. Now the militancy at Turfloop has been given a fresh spurt by the triumph of the Frelimo terrorist movement in Mozambique.” (Copied in White, 1997:109) Tiro was the President of the SRC in the early 1970s, and his critique of the Bantu education system was launched at a graduation ceremony held in April 1972. He described the paradoxical nature of the fact that family members of black graduates were not allowed to attend the ceremony, while the families of white academic staff were present in numbers. The university administration was humiliated by the speech and decided to expel Tiro, who refused to make an official apology (White 1997:104-7; Mawasha 2006:72f). Tiro’s expulsion was followed by mass protests across the country as an expression of black solidarity. But Tiro’s speech not only led to his expulsion from university; it also set the path for his continued struggle activities, which saw him murdered by a letter bomb in Botswana in 1974.

Load more